More Debian and Systemd, *Ubuntu Reviews, and Fedora Confusion
Debian and systemd top Linux news today with the latter being blamed for the loss of high profile Debian developer. Paul Venezia says Red Hat has confused Linux users with its latest Fedora moves and bloggers contemplate Debian and other forks. Adrian Bridgwater says had Linux been proprietary it would have cost $1 trillion and Michael Meeks talks OpenGL rendering in LibreOffice.
Sam Varghese published a couple of articles discussing systemd's part in the loss of the Debian kFreeBSD arch and long time developer Joey Hess. Joey Hess posted a short "so long and thanks for all the fish" to the Debian Development mailing list Friday afternoon. In that post Hess said, "It's become abundantly clear that this is no longer the project I originally joined in 1996." He later added:
If I have one regret from my 18 years in Debian, it's that when the Debian constitution was originally proposed, despite seeing it as dubious, I neglected to speak out against it. It's clear to me now that it's a toxic document, that has slowly but surely led Debian in very unhealthy directions.
In another article, Varghese says developer explanation for the dropping of the kFreeBSD architecture is a bit vague. They said it was due to quality concerns but Varghese says it was really because systemd only works with Linux. He reports arm64 and ppc64el archs will be available in Debian 8.
Steve Kemp took a serious look at forking Debian over the weekend and said, "The biggest stumbling block is that the Debian distribution contains thousands of packages, which are maintained by thousands of developers. A small team has virtually no hope of keeping up." So, it would have to be split into '"supported" and "unsupported."' The first things to go? GNOME and KDE!
Relatedly, Dietrich Schmitz says all this discussion of a Debian fork is putting a big ole clould over the project's head causing user confusion and being divisive. He continues saying, "Forking dilutes the effectiveness of staying to a singular purpose which makes achieving standards all the more difficult. The end result of such a fork will result in a general decline in the use of Debian."
Adrian Bridgwater quotes James Dixon on ComputerWeekly.com saying, "The Linux source code is estimated to be over 30 millions lines of code which, using conventional methods, would have taken almost 8,000 person years at a cost of over $1 trillion." Bridgwater paraphrases Dixon saying the success of Open Source is due to "a set of generally-accepted principles and philosophies that are able to produce high-quality software."
In Ubuntu news today, we have three reviews of Ubuntu and derivatives. First up is Dedoimedo.com saying that Kubuntu 14.10 is predictable "in the sense hat it will never give you a fully satisfying experience out of the box, and it will do its best to be controversial, bi-polar and restrained by default."
Linuxed is next with a look at Xubuntu 14.10. After extensive testing he said, "I think frankly the developers could have done better for Xubuntu 14.10. The previous LTS version was a better release from performance and stability aspects."
And, finally, the Everyday Linux User Gary Newell said "Ubuntu 14.10 is a maintenance release with a number of upgraded applications and an upgraded kernel." After the looksee Newell said, "99.99% of the time Ubuntu 14.10 works without error" and "Ubuntu 14.10 is another nice little step forward for Ubuntu without being spectacular."
In other news:
* OpenGL rendering for LibreOffice 4.4
* Red Hat confuses Linux users with latest Fedora moves
* GNOME starts campaign to protect its trademarks